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File Sharing - Sunday, December 4, 2005

Airena (AirSet) - Profile

HQ: Pleasant Hill, CA

Founded: 2003

Management: CEO Brian Dougherty was founder of interactive TV company Wink Communications. Wink had an IPO and peaked at a $1.4B before being sold to Liberty Media in 2002 and later bought again by OpenTV. He also founded Geoworks, a make rof operating systems that developed the first interface for AOL and IMagic, a video game developer. He got his start at Mattel Intellivision - the first good video game console on the market.

Investors: The company has raised $2.5M in Series A funding from Brian Dougherty. The company is working on its first outside round.

Business Model: AirSet offers a free personal productivity tool but charges $4.99 per month for mobile service. Users manage shared calendars, contacts, lists, blogs and Web links via a single interface. The real value is that anyone can enjoy enterprise MSFT Outlook calendar functionality outside the enterprise and for much less dough. It also includes Skype integration, sync to Outlook and Palm, RSS feeds, text message and email alerts. AirSet's first mobile client is slated to launch with Verizon in December. It will enable users to access and update their group calendars, contacts and lists from their cell phones. Users can make a change to an event or contact and over-the-air sync it to everybody in a group.

Making the Simpson's Springfield Better Organized

Competitors: CalendarHub, Zimbra, PlaxoPlanzo, Kiko , Trumba, RSSCalendar.com, Backpack, Yahoo Calendar.

Dirt: We expect that the wave of new Web-based personal information management companies will leapfrog each other with various companies taking turn as the best-of-breed. Today, AirSet appears to be the best thanks to it having the broadest vision, encompassing so many elements that make one productive. The pricing holds together, the functionality is terrific and the management is solid. Given that competitor Trumba recently raised $8M, we imagine Airena will do something comparable.